Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

Recent smol thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088

Thank you for sharing!

and then spend most of their time arguing about it?

Anyone know where we can hear such recordings?

> They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation.

> To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established this dictionary,” says Berthlet. “We have one vocalisation and one meaning.”

This is lots of manual effort, could the recent advancement in language models help decode animal languages more easily? I guess it will need lots 24/7 capture of physical movement/action and sound data and train a model (that already understands vocal English too) perhaps.

It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion.

Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the world. You turn your community into a meta organism: rather than continuous appendages and nerve endings you might have a meerkat a couple hundred yards observing for predators for you sharing their own senses on their own body with you through their long distance communication abilities in the form of their vocalizations or body language. Now you can solely be a meerkat and get all this information about the area without having to evolve into some lovecraftian horror with a set of eyes and ears every 100 yards.

they're called Large Language Monkeys

I definitely think you’re touching on some exciting possibilities, but adding a language model at this early stage would endanger the goal of this particular research: proving that the compositionality exists in the first place. If there was a foundational language model we’re involved, it might be reading patterns into the calls regardless of whether they’re really there — that is what it’s designed to do, after all!

Re:”lots of work”, I think you’re misunderstanding the quotes a bit. They applied PCA to categorical data to generate semantic positions for each call type—or, in other words, ran a prewritten mathy algo on a big csv. Collecting the CSV data in the first place certainly sounds extremely hard, but that’s more of a practical issue than a scientific one! Bonobos aren’t known for living in easy-to-reach places ;)

Language is not just "communication" and not every communication is language. Bees and ants communicate information chemically, but they're not using a structured language. Dogs may growl to intimidate or yelp if they get hurt, and that surely communicates information, but whether they are using a structured language is a matter of research.

I don't think anyone denies that communication is not unique to humans. It is clearly not. But what is (apparently - as far as we know) unique to humans is language, meaning the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in their own mind.

There's evidence that language first evolved as a capacity for processing the outside world internally - your inner voice, if you will. The ability to synthesize any idea about things you can and can not see or even ever experience. The speaking and communicative part of it may have actually arisen secondarily, as evidenced by the fact that "language" does not have to be spoken - it can be expressed in many different mediums.

Communication and language are not one in the same. Language is a means of communication, but it also so much more than that.

I found the book Why Only Us by Chomsky and Berwick to a be a great introduction to the topic.

This is a lively debate in linguistics, so while it’s not objectively true (i.e. it depends on how you want to use the word), it’s much more justified than you’re implying here. As others have said, it’s about distinguishing the kind of communication humans do from simple animal communication — a common hook for this topic is the fun fact that “chimpanzees can learn sign language, but they’ve never asked a question”. It’s somewhat analogous to how animal communication can be seen as categorically distinct from simple signaling done by flowers, scent markers, etc.

I’m in a bit of a rush but suffice to say that Chomsky is probably the best champion of the “language is compositional” view, or as he puts it, “language is the generation of an infinite range of meaningful outputs from a finite range of inputs”. There’s dozens of great, layperson-friendly talks of his on this topic on YouTube, for anyone who’s curious!

Cute.

Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.

If bonobos start using syntax, it’s only a matter of time before they demand a seat at the dinner table and correct my grammar mid-banana.

Thanks for validating my data-hoarding tendencies.

I'm just following my Homo Archivium genetic programming.

> calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress"

It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who learned sign language have supposedly never done so.

To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have information that you don't, and you can access it in their writings or give them information with yours. If you can't conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make sense at all.

If you make that cloud exist in a high enough number of dimensions you'll find yourself emulating a machine learning language model. :)

If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.

We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation.

Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories.

Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ .

I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.

I’d love for that to be true, but our species dates back 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago. Writing is definitely not a fundamental trait of our species, although once we got this update, things started moving quickly.

In the article it says that “This finding doesn’t mean that bonobos have language, though”.

How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on. Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing was invented.

I’m definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in prehistory.

> rather the fact we write down what we know

Writing is a very recent invention, about 5-6kya for the oldest known script, and effectively one of the last inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya, and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest domestication of crops and animals.

Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over literate Mayan city-states and still not adopt any writing or proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make you ask "what is a writing system?").

More like 5000 or 6000 years ago at least for permanent writing I'd say? I definitely read about cuneiform tablets and cylinders from 3500BCE.

Before that might have been on wood so we don't know much about it.

> Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society

Isn't this going a bit too far? Sure they didn't have a modern writing system like Mayans, or even proto-writing systems like Inca's quipu but we do have hard evidence of Teotihuacan society communicating language with painted symbols (e.g. findings in La Ventilla). It's unclear to me how we can say they didn't leave writing to future generations (especially assuming probably there were a lot more stuff that was lost to time than we can see)

Also, this comment seems to slightly misunderstand what the GP said imho. Yes writing is a new invention, but e.g. paintings in Lascaux are about 17k years old. Which means even before Catalhoyuk level civilizations, humans were leaving symbols for later generations to look and decipher. This is the same "archival" process GP is talking about. Humans leave a message to future generations. It seems like our biology must prime us to do it, because we see it universally. Whether the messages we leave are writing, painting, music or whatever... humans still produce things for people that'll come after them. But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community. So, perhaps ironically, part of being human-smart is having human-precise hands that can paint/write. Without this ability, we end up like bonobos, elephants, dolphins etc perhaps smart but for all they know their parents were the Adam and Eve.

The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...

What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?

I'm not saying there wasn't any cultural advancement prior to the invention of using written language to store information for use by others. Just that there wasn't any human behavior that distinguished it as unique among all other species on earth.

I think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.

...but is there another species that writes things down for other individuals in their species to reference?

> I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological

In terms of intelligence, yes, but in terms of what we've achieved then "technology" such as writing/archiving certainly has made a massive difference, else we'd be limited to what could be built by passing down oral history and skills passed from one generation to the next, much like Aboriginal Australians.

I suspect that the neurological (& vocal) differences that make us more intelligent than other apes are likely extremely few - more like "fine tuning" differences than anything major.

Fortunately bonobos have not yet learned to say "No".

Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief about anthropology? Just research it for ten minutes.

Some beliefs should be lightly held.

You’re directionally right, modern comparative mythology studies suggest that people were telling stories ~100 000 years ago when they went out of Africa, they had an “oral library”. We find many similar tropes alongside their migration roads.

The top specialist is Berezkin, he collected thousands of tropes and put it on a map http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/

> One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences.

I would think that syntax is a structure to the sequence of symbols, not just a sequence in any order. For example:

    Thag ate Fish
    Fish ate Thag

have different meanings.

I guess it is hard to say… if you looked at humans in any random moment when we’ve been around, I suppose we’d look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments progress generation-to-generation).

But, it does feel like there’s something in our storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about the universe).

From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of the loop. A big one, though.

> For example, the phrase “blonde dancer” has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer.

This seems a rather odd "random" language example, especially coming from New Scientist. Being politically correct by then referring to the "blonde" as a "person" doesn't help much. May as well just use "brunette stripper" as an example - a brown haired person who takes their clothes off for money.

The study of human language is linguistics. A related study is “human language” compared to some other “[animal] language”. Chomsky has argued that “human language” is categorically different from some, say, other primate “language”.

As soon as you have a scientific pursuit you need to define it. Somehow. And it isn’t gonna be close to some intuitive notion of “language”. Because that’s just, I dunno, any kind of semiotics to us average persons. (Is your pet jumping up on your leg and wagging its tail communicating meaning? Yeah)

So of course there’s gonna be some definition of language, and maybe even a scientific consensus one way or the other with regards to sundries questions, like if other animals have “language” similar to “human language”. And it’s gonna have very little overlap with people vibing with their pets.

Syntax is hierarchical, and not as much sequential as you may think. LLMs are based on these two facts.

I think that you might be taking that example in bad faith.

Making models of the physical world is a lot of work. Can’t they install cameras and record hundreds of thousands of hours of objects getting shot through cannons, birds flying and trees swaying in the wind? Maybe with some more nuclear power plants they could get close to approximating something like Newton’s Laws of Motion (kind of close is good enough, no need to be nerdy about it).

Honey bees do the waggle dance though:

https://animalwise.org/2011/08/25/the-honeybee-waggle-dance-...

By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic.

However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level.

I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point where there is writing but it's not very accessible... And Egyptian civilization is slow to develop (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)

> (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)

i'm not sure if this is the case or not but if it is lack of evidence may not be evidence of a lack! they may have done and it may have not been transmitted to us

Really? How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women, and if you really feel the need to use "blonde" as your adjective, but insist it's a sexless "person", then how about "blonde engineer" instead of "blonde dancer"?!

I've got nothing against blonde dancers, and am far from politically correct myself, but in a scientific article about language and Bonobos, couldn't they have chosen a more appropriate example such as "yellow banana"?

> This finding doesn’t mean that bonobos have language, though, because language is the human communication system

I hate this attitude.

Also, I'm curious how advances in AI will shape our empathy towards animals.

I really wonder if that's a misquote or poor paraphrase. It's not in quotation marks.

> This finding doesn’t mean that bonobos have language, though, because language is the human communication system, says Berthet. “But we’re showing that they have a very complex communication system that shares parallels with human language.”

> Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief?

What an interesting thing to say/ask.

To my knowledge Homo Sapiens developed long before writing was used. And there are plenty of tribes who use only oral transmission. I agree with the idea that we are archivists, be it written or oral. With written you can archive much more info though.

The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire.

By a strict definition of writing (e.g. what we're doing now), people have only been able to write for a few thousand years, and much of the adult population was illiterate until recently. Define it widely enough (visual communication of information), and some other animals (e.g. tigers) also "write": https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-s...

You could reasonably argue though, that we have passed on information over long periods of time orally, e.g. in epic poems, and that (as far as we know) no other animal does that.

>If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.

I'm not sure I understand why this would necessarily be what you would expect. I would say it's entirely the other way around. If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists, that might be at the frontier of the outer limits of the capability we're able to reach, so it might only show up in certain pockets or subsets of our overall population. Getting there would still hinge on favorable probabilities and circumstances that might only obtain in a small percentage of cases.

As for Socrates, I must confess I am rather smitten with him as a historical figure and as a philosopher, but for the many great things that Socrates is, I don't think he's a reliable authority for the evolutionary history of humanity writ large. I suspect that you're entirely right that oral traditions are more emotionally resonant and powerful than written traditions. But don't think there's any logical fallacy or contradiction in supposing that nevertheless a written tradition could emerge in parallel with oral traditions.

I suppose I do agree with your end point though, which is that I'm not sure that a disposition towards the writing can be pointed to as like a singular thing that's at the essence of what it is to be human. In fact, I would say that that very question is kind of romanticized and abstract in a way that doesn't make clear contact with our scientific understanding and therefore is kind of a malformed question. But I don't have to agree with that form of question to nevertheless believe that our capability to put language into a written form had rather transcendent consequences for us as a species.

Cool!

Now do it for cetaceans.

Writing is a new phenomenon. It's certainly a novel ability, but genetically we were around for a few million years before we even developed civilization, tens of thousands more before behavioral modernity, and only in the last 10k years have we developed writing. But other commenters have already said as much.

I would contest that what makes us unique is recursion as a general ability. In that sense, writing is a method of recursively building knowledge. But we also have it with spoken language, as we recursively build vocabulary and grammar into complex communication. We have it with tools, as we are the only species (at least as far as I know) that uses tools to make tools. We also seem to have it with our physical abilities: witness the constantly broken records in competition sports.

I think that's exactly the right question and the answer is pretty clear that there is no comparison. I do understand that there's a little bit of something going on with water-based mammals like orcas and dolphins being able to teach certain skills to their young and so there's a notion of intergenerational knowledge there. But we're just a different order of magnitude in terms of our capability of transmitting intergenerational knowledge and it's not even close. It's almost disappointing because there's no interesting question of comparison between us and other species.

As I mentioned in another comment, I'm skeptical of the questions that imply a kind of species essentialism, suggesting that there's such a thing as a one particular trait that distinctly makes us human. I think the real answer to questions like that are vast convergences of immense clusters of facts relating to our evolutionary history and our morphology and so on. I don't think there's any like one single thing. But I do think in comparison to other species a rather elegant way of distinguishing this is to put to our written traditions which as far as I know don't really have any precedent. And if that doesn't blow you away in terms of how miraculous and special are evolutionary trajectory is, I don't suspect anything would. But the important thing is that you don't need a species essentialism to be impressed with who and what we are.

>By that metric Native Americans are basically animals..

The Cherokee had an extremely well developed written tradition, so I don't think that inference would follow at all.

I’m not sure I follow, which other animals have cities and agriculture?

If you really wanted your pedantry to sound smart, you'd have also noted that bonobos aren't monkeys, they're apes.

> How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women

Never, because men's hair is "blond".

But seriously, the original quote does not call the person "a blonde," (which indeed might offend some) but instead uses "blonde" as an adjective to describe the dancer, which is perfectly acceptable. You can have a "blond man" or a "brown-haired man" just as easily as you can have a "blonde woman".

There has been a LOT of research on this. A popsci book I've read on the topic is Adam's Tongue. It details the features that separate what's called Animal Communication Systems from human language.

https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo...

Obviously pets are quite capable of making their wishes known to us, especially if we facilitate it. It's unclear whether they're actually achieving language. I'm tempted to think they are, especially when I see dogs using push buttons to talk to us on Instagram. But I can't be totally sure.

And even if they were, it would be language we taught them. Not independently developed in the wild.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601682 - April 2025 (2 comments)

Bonobos' calls may be the closest thing to animal language we've seen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088 - April 2025 (12 comments)

No, because "bad dancer" is used to illustrate meaning changing in a complex way; it is a person who is bad at dancing, not a bad person who is dancing. Whereas "bad banana" is a bad banana; "bad" operates the same way as "yellow" on "banana", but "bad" and "blonde" operate differently on "dancer."

Really seems like you're trying to enforce your own form of political correctness here - "PC" is associated with certain progressives, but the problem is policing language and picking fights over trivial nonsense.

From the early 1800's, created by a single person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

Ants, but that’s a whole other discussion around what constitutes writing.

Which is why people look into specific elements of language not just huge generalizations.

Well, as an example of language/syntax, any language example (including "blonde dancer") would be "acceptable", but in this context something like "fruit tree" might be more appropriate than "dumb Polack" (no offense - just a syntax example).

Yeah, but that's just another example of communication-without-language

This part of title is interesting: "...once thought to be unique to humans"

Which could apply to anything in future.

This seems sort of a secondary cause of our unique linguistic abilities. Afaik no other animal can use recursive grammars. Certainly not to the same extent.

Anyway this also excludes all the humans that never wrote anything, which is most of them. If anything our verbal history is our strongest and most ancient culture.

You don’t think a meerkat when introduced something novel into their environment relevant to them, would ‘t come up with a concept for representing that idea to their own species? I think they would, absolutely. What we do as humans isn’t unique despite how we insist on thinking that about ourselves. It is why we can study neuroscience using fruit flies.

Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so? For the longest time, humans memorized their stories and passed them down to younger generations by rote memorization.

I had a dog that you could ask to do complex tasks and he'd happily go about and do it.

"Go around the corner and get your toy out of the laundry basket".

He'd go around the corner and get his toy out of the laundry basket.

You could also ask him to get dressed (he'd get his rain coat and do his best to put it on) and you could ask him to get other dogs ready to go (he'd grab their leashes and drape the leash around the other dog's necks).

> Not independently developed in the wild.

I'm pretty sure the crows who live next to my house have a complex language. Different squawks for different circumstances. I can tell when one is addressing me vs when the male is calling to his partner.

> And even if they were, it would be language we taught them.

Humans smarted their way into a surplus of food, which allowed us to do lots of other cool things like have time for art, language, and spending years and years raising our young.

That doesn't mean we are inherently superior, it just means an excess of food allows plenty of time to do non-food related things.

Surely bad and blonde (not intended to imply gender) are just adjectives - a dancer who is bad (at dancing), or a dancer who is blonde?

Trust me, if you met me you would not be suggesting I am PC - but this really jumped off the page at me. Such a strange example for this context!

Interesting comment. Why ants? Do they use symbols to express complex ideas to each other?

Cave drawings throughout the American southwest demonstrate Native Americans of antiquity were just as capable of expressing symbolic thought via a durable medium to express meaning to other humans as so-called modern humans.

I know I'm arguably moving the goalposts here from "writing stuff down for others to read" to "using symbols on a durable medium to express meaning to other humans." But that's a category of behavior that writing belongs to so I don't think it's logically inconsistent. :)

Awesome. A truly impressive feat that, among all the various and sundry species populating the earth, is only achievable by a human. That is exactly my point... thank you! :)

great point about our "biomorphology" being a perhaps-essential building block of the uniquely human ability to convey information symbolically for later retrieval.

Chimps and crows are documented using tools to make tools. Crows in particular can make compound tools. Orangs make cutting tools out of two rocks they pound together.

Neither tool use nor manufacture is uniquely human!

I don't think this really holds. we know, for example, that there were precolombian civilizations that wrote things down like the Maya and the Aztec, though much of it was destroyed during colonization.

Re: oral transmission , I'm operating under the (unsubstantiated) assumption at least some species of dolphins and whales, at least, are conveying "tribal" information orally between generations (locations of reliable hunting grounds, stuff like that). There's no definitive proof of this, afaik, it's just something that seems likelier than not to me.

Re: defining it broadly... The definition I've landed on thru defending my stated belief in these comments is, "Conveying information symbolically by etching it into or onto a durable medium so it can be referred to later."

But I guess an important quality of "writing" is that it's information that could otherwise be communicated with spoken language, and that the written and spoken languages are isomorphic.. maybe?

Honestly this is the first time I've put this idea out into the world for criticism so I'm still working thru these things :)

Bees.

> Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on.

"Strongly held belief" would suggest authority on the subject, but I suspect this is not the case. By comparison, while I accept the efficacy of vaccines on the authority of the authors of scientific texts on immunology and draw on circumstantial information to infer probable reliability of said authorities, I wouldn't say I have a "strongly held belief" either as this would suggest that I, personally, have authority on the subject, which I don't. My knowledge, as descriptively rich as it might be, nonetheless rests on a chain of authority.

In any case, the first problem in these discussions is the superficial notion of "language" that's often employed. "Language", as a system of signs, entails signification, and the kind of signification human language engages in is not merely a degree removed from the kind of signification other animals engage in. There is a difference in kind. There is a big difference between a distress call and expressing the proposition "There are five red berries in the tall bush". A distress call requires no abstract concepts; the latter proposition requires five. While we can say there is something like or analogous to syntactic structure in a distress call or some series of joined calls, none of these require concepts. And abstraction of concepts is the most central and unique faculty of rationality, as it is by means of concepts that we can reason about the world. They are the seat of intentionality, not mere imagism.

> If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists

Intelligence - predicting the future rather than reacting to the present - unlocks the possibility of communicating about the future rather than just the present (basic animal calls - predator alerts, intimidation threats, mating calls, etc), which means the message can have value in the future if stored and transmitted (unlike a predator alert which is useless if not delivered in the moment).

It seems that writing, or proto-writing (drawings become symbolic glyphs?), probably developed before message carrying/sending, which then becomes the big capability unlock - the ability to send/spread information and therefore for humans to become a "collective intelligence" able to build upon each other's discoveries.

It's interesting why some groups of humans never culturally developed along this path though - aboriginees and forest peoples who have no written language. Is it because of their mode of life, or population density perhaps? Cultural isolation? Why have these groups not found the utility for written language?

Apparently as recently as 1800 global literacy rate was only around 10% - perhaps just a reflection that in the modern world you can passively benefit from the products of our collective intelligence without yourself being part of the exchange, or perhaps a reflection that desire for information is not the norm for our species - more for the intelligentsia?!

Where’s the lie?

Peak anthropocentrism. You see this attitude all over, unfortunately even in circles that should know better. It even feels circular, like saying "Language is how we know people are more 'advanced' than animals, but animals can never have language, because language is what humans do."

> Why ants?

It fits the basic concept of writing, where complex ideas are communicating through time rather than space.

As to using symbols it depends on what you mean by symbols. Though an ants nest is a dark environment so writing the way we think of it via coloration would be a useless. In such an environment pheromones have inherent advantages, but you can’t get the same highly detailed shapes.

> the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in their own mind.

We don't know that animals can't. We know that some animals can convey detailed information very extensively, but we don't know the structure of the communication well enough as to claim that it isn't via something equivalent to human language. Crows, for instance, can inform other crows about specific people, or characteristics of people, without those things being present. That would generally require descriptive communication to do, which inherently implies an abstraction. Where's the line between that and human language?

> The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire.

There is some suggestion that other animals can control fire.

https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-jus...

I don't know if that's completely verified or not, but it seems like a problematic definition. You could imagine a group of intelligent birds or apes could discover ways to control fire.

No, the thing that truly sets us apart from other animals is the ability to create the hydrogen bomb.

Whilst some here are critiquing this point of view due to writing's recency, there's actually some academic support for the ancient impact of "archival" if we can consider a broader definition for it, namely: linguistic works such as stories, poems, songs etc. A classic study of this is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Li...

The basic idea is that say, lyrics, are a technological innovation that "stores" information across time and space because it aides in recall.

I never even considered insects but bees are a perfect example, I can see where you’re coming from now. A hive as a city, honey as a crop they farm by collecting pollen and refining it. There’s even specialized roles and a class hierarchy, just like humans! Ants build nests that could similarly be considered cities as well.

I was going to mention this as well. Further, I remember reading dolphins being capable of similar feats. I also remember hearing about regional animals dialects.

Any animals capable of providing accurate descriptions of things to one another would have to be using something like language. It would require both some kind symbolic thought and structure of those symbols whether they be auditory, visual, or a combination of the two.

If people want to use “language” for humans alone, okay… but it is quite clear that some animals use a communication system nearly as complex if not equivalent.

> Now we have evidence that both chimps and bonobos have syntax, it is inevitable that this capacity for compositionality was inherited from our last common ancestor, says Leroux. “They just showed, unambiguously, that this core building block is evolutionary ancient and at least 7 million years old, and maybe even older.”

This is not true at all. It's like saying that tool construction must be >300 million years old because both chimpanzees and New Caledonian crows make tools. Things can be invented or discovered multiple times by different species. It might be inherited from a common source, but it might not.

The question is whether or not cultures that had no writing systems were limited to the same level of intelligence and/or development that other primates exhibit.

Given that with exception of an interesting knot-encoded (Quipu) system for some period of the Inca empire, the entire human population of the Americas (at least 15-20% of the total human population) fits this description, the answer seems to be "no". These cultures built huge cities (among the largest in the world at the time), used sophisticated irrigation schemes, ceramics technology and more.

Agree with most of what you're saying here, but:

> But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community.

We just don't know if this is true.

But also not a part of the human experience among all the ancestors of the Cherokee people, or more or less all humans in the Americas, all the way back to whenever humans first arrived in the Americas (likely 25k-30k years ago, at least).

There are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human cultures that existed at the time Homer was writing, or when Gilgamesh was written, that also have no equivalent.

The idea that any roughly equivalent human culture will develop the same things is clearly wrong. Just look at the plough - for centuries or even millenia, humans outside of what is now China had ploughs but failed to gain the insight to improve it in the way it was improved in China. Once trade exposed them to the Chinese plough, it was more or less universally adopted within decades.

While multiple (re)invention may be common, it is not universal. Just because culture A manages to find is way to cultural/technological innovation doesn't imply that culture B will, even if the two cultures are very similar.

The fact you had to clarify "at dancing" is why they're different.

Think about it as a decomposition where "dancer" means "dancing person."

In the simple case, both "blonde" and "dancing" separately modify "person." If you diagram that it’s a Y: either modifier could be removed without changing the meaning of the other, and their order isn’t important.

In the complex case, "bad" modifies "dancing," which together modify "person." That’s an ordered chain, which is more complex to build and comprehend. Your clarification illustrates the chaining and why it’d be a fundamentally different meaning if that wasn’t understood.

I’m not even touching whatever you were going for with the blonde/brunette thing. It's plain they used the example because there's no possible way hair color could be a modifier for "dancing," and they wanted something unambiguous.

But isn’t what whatever we call language just a few more levels of recursion in fundamentally the same continuous process?

It is exciting times in animal communication.

This is not just distributional information analysis in the sense that ‘tokens’ are grounded in other ‘tokens’. They’ve grounded these calls in naturalistic situational context. This is hard won data.

If I understand, the finding here is that bonobo calls are “non-trivially” compositional, e.g., the semantic embeddings of pairs of vocalizations point in different directions surrounding the base vocalization. But it seems there is no “trivial” compositionality in the sense that constructions like [good __] might point in a similar direction. I would expect this latter result. This seems like a conspicuous absence? Is this really compositionality? Not sure what to make of it.

Some interesting context: bonobos and other (non-human) great apes are believed to have more intentional and flexible control over their gestural repertoire than their vocal repertoire and that these gestural repertoires are larger. Human language likely evolved from gesture (or so some believe). So, if their vocalizations are in fact compositional, it may be a separate evolutionary prong.

Cue the goalpost moving.

> Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so?

No, absolutely not. It's barely 5,000 years old.

>By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic.

just as it's not problematic to discover that bonobos talk to each other like Shakespeare, it would not be problematic to discover that humans are animals. keep your fingers off the scales (and, to mix a metaphor) let the scales fall from your eyes: it's science, follow the evidence to the truth. Don't be guided by what you want to hear, in either direction.

Might this explain why Italians can’t talk if you tie their hands?

This is certainly interesting, but I'm not sure I'd call this "syntax" (and I'm no Chomskyan).

I think your sentence would be much more accurate if you replace hierarchical with recursive.

> Is this really compositionality?

Usually it would be called "noncompositionality", the phenomenon that distinguishes words from phrases or sentences. As you might expect from that term, it's the opposite of compositionality. It also goes under the fancier name "the arbitrariness of the sign" or the even fancier "l'arbitraire du signe".

For example, hat, sat, bat, and flat are all semantically unlike each other, and flare, phlegm, flick, and flood are also all semantically unlike each other. It isn't the case that you can predict the meaning of flat by knowing what hat, sat, bat, flare, phlegm, flick, and flood mean.

The article draws an analogy to a general syntactic rule:

> But, so far, only “trivial compositionality” has been identified in non-human animals, whereby each unit adds independently to the meaning of the whole. For example, the phrase “blonde dancer” has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer. Humans were thought to be unique in also having “non-trivial compositionality”, where the words in a combination means something different to what they mean individually. For example, the phrase “bad dancer” doesn’t mean a bad person who also dances.

Bad dancer is compositional in that you can know the meaning of the phrase by knowing the meanings of bad and dancer. So far so good; the article agrees that it is compositional.

They observe that the two words in the phrase aren't independent; a one-legged dancer is a dancer who has one leg, but a bad dancer isn't a dancer who is bad in general; it's a person who is bad at dancing.

The reason this is still compositional is that you can use any appropriate adjective this way: you can be a strong dancer, an energetic dancer, a timid dancer... so this is just a rule about the formation of certain English phrases, and knowing what bad means in general is sufficient to know what bad means in the phrase bad dancer.

They don't appear to be making a similar claim for the bonobos:

> For example, “high-hoot + low-hoot” combines the calls that seem to mean “pay attention to me” and “I am excited” to say “pay attention to me because I am in distress”

This example looks more like an arbitrary sign to me. But that might be an artifact of poor data management:

> they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established this dictionary,” says Berthlet. “We have one vocalisation and one meaning.”

There is no reason to expect that one vocalisation should possess only one meaning.

They also have poor methodology:

> Once they had this semantic cloud, they could see whether the individual calls in a combination had distinct meanings, and found that the combinations were close to the units that they were made of, which would suggest compositionality. Using this approach, they identified four compositional calls

By comparison, throw, throw up, and throw away are all similar in meaning, which is why they have similar forms, but they are not compositional - knowing what one of them means won't help you with the others.

As others have pointed out, writing is a very recent phenomenon, but your intuition seems correct in general - what sets humans apart from chimps and bonobos is efficient transfer learning to future generations. If you are interested, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello makes this point in detail. Tomasello argues that chimps, while being impressive learners and problem solvers in some ways, actually have extremely inefficient cultural transfer, which prevents runaway cultural evolution that has happened in humans.

True, at least conceptually (does brain actually do recursion?) - I was really thinking of linguist's hierarchical sentence parse trees, which are a nice visual representation of how different parts of sentence are syntactically unrelated and can therefore be processed in parallel, with levels of the "hierarchy" then corresponding to layers of the LLM.

Yes, for sure humans are fundamentally more intelligent than other primates, but still it does seem that writing and written communication is a big capability unlock.

It's impressive, and perhaps a bit surprising, what a culture like the Incas were able to achieve using only (we assume) oral tradition and passing down of skills, but there must be a limit to the complexity of what can be passed down this way - more along the lines of the skillset of an individual man being passed to an apprentice, but presumably also "managers/planners" passing down skills as well as tradesmen.

I think the key differentiator is Prefrontal Synthesis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_synthesis

This is the ability to mentally compose conceptual objects in complex relationships.

In fact I don’t think there really is one single significant differentiator. There are many. However without this one technology beyond simple single function tools such as a hand axe or pointed stick, and simple linguistic statements wouldn’t be be possible.

The linguistic composition described in the article sound similar if dramatically more primitive, but I don’t think we can assume it comes from a common ancestor. It may well be that this capability has a different neurological basis, since these animals don’t have a prefrontal cortex. So it seems plausible this is a case or parallel evolution of a very rudimentary similar feature. Fascinating stuff though.

Don't forget that homo sapiens is not the only humanoid species to evolve on this planet. We had a few different contemporaries in prehistory.

Your strongly held belief that flies in the face of the dominant belief among today's leading linguists

There was literacy in the Americas prior to Columbus. Among the Aztecs, the tlacuilos (scribes) were educated in the calmecac. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmian_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_hieroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixtec_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_script

It's been awhile since I read the book, but I do seem to remember them discussing crows specifically.

Just to be pedantic, it is unclear if the Aztecs had "full writing". The notation system in the codices is probably more like a kind of mnemonic and accounting system along with a calendar. They probably couldn't write arbitrary sentences. But so little material survives we don't actually know!

The Maya though absolutely had "full writing" at least during the classical phase around 200 - 800 AD, and their writing probably derived from the older Olmec system. The Maya system worked much like classical Japanese or ancient Egyptian, and uses a mix of ideographs and purely phonetic symbols. They could, and did, write anything they could say. There are historical accounts of battles and names and etc. given in monumental inscriptions. And it is almost certain during the classical era that the Maya had full literature, with stories, mythology, histories, anthologies, religious scripture, etc. There were probably still priests who could read the Maya system when the Spanish arrived - one Jesuit recorded notes that indicate some of the phonetic values of some of the symbols correctly! - but they were mostly killed and most of the codices burned by the conquistadors.

It was not deciphered again until the 1970s and it's sadly still not widely appreciated that Mesoamerica had literate civilizations.

Fun fact: The Maya were such good astronomers and record-keepers that we have exact date alignment, which we have neither for Ancient Egypt or for Mesopotamia. For example any dates in Assyrian records are subject to a ~40 year window of uncertainty for exactly when they occurred. There is no such ambiguity for the Maya: Pacal the Great almost certainly died on August 29, 683.

Cultural learning has definitely been observed in animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture

I would say that the real killer invention of humans, compared to other apes, is the way to overcome the Dunbar number and organize very large coordinated groups.

The rise of agriculture in Mesopotamia enabled by it predates writing systems, and the first cuneiform records are purely numerical, for asset tracking. Huge armies, like these of Alexander or Genghis Khan, consisted of mostly illiterate warriors.

I'd argue that the invention of the virtual hierarchies, when a peasant submits to a king who he never saw in person, eventually led to the invention of gods, and later a supreme "creator of the universe" figure. That allowed for even more complex cooperative social structures, still across mostly illiterate populations, even though holy scriptures play a central role in such religions.

> but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build

As far as we can tell humans were doing that orally for thousands of years before writing became a thing.

You had major civilizations with complex bureaucracies that were not effectively almost entirely illiterate..

Interesting that this is the only place on the internet where "Homo Archivum" has ever been uttered.

Surely what sets us apart is complexity?

Our brains are able to understand and process very complex abstract concepts and we can communicate those to each other.

Oral tradition is almost an unavoidable byproduct of that, and while writing it down is certainly useful, it's clearly the case that humans were archiving and disseminating information orally for a long time before we invented writing.